practiced by enslaved people. >> watch history professors lead discussions with their students on topics ranging from the american revolution to september 11th, lectures in history on c-span3 every saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv and lectures and history is available as a podcast. find it where you listen to podcasts. claire evans the author of "broadband." she discusses the extensive 20th century contributions of women to the development of computer technology. this event was part of the university of mary washington's great lives series. >> now, in addition, before introducing tonight's speaker, i would like to publicly express prish wrags to this evening's sponsor, theresa crowley dds.

[ applause ] don't get carried away. she'll get, you know. now, obviously, i could do this privately and i have, but i'd like to say a public thank you to terry for her support, which has not only been tangible in support of the series but also personal in her encouragement and advice over the course of many years, including many good topic suggestions and if you are here, you know she was responsible for the beach boys, but others we have enjoyed over the years. thanks to her suggestion. so, terry, would you please stand up? [ applause ] now, tonight's speaker claire l. evans has achieved notable success both as a musician and as a writer. in the former career, she is the lead singer and co-founder of

the conception al pop group yacht and has in fact recently turned from a tour in europe with that group. but it is her second career as an expert in the area of technology that brings her to us tonight. in that regard, she is the former futures editor of mother board and a contributor to vice, kwaurts, the guardian and wired among other publications. now, she is, for example, the founding editor of tara form, vice's science fiction vertical. however, the thing that particularly commends her to our attention, brings her here tonight, is a book she has just written. i'll say more about that in a second. but she has lectured widely about science fiction, art, and technology around the world in such venues as the new museum of contemporary art, arizona state

university, uc, university of california-berkeley, the her sean museum and the riverside museum of art in beijing, among many others. she lives in los angeles where she runs the l.a. centric culture app 5 every day. as i mentioned, foremost among the accomplishments that brings her to mary washington is her recent highly acclaimed and path-breaking book titled "broadband the untold story of the women who made the internet" which was published in 2018. one reader of that work had this to say. i'm quoting. broadband is thrilling, powerful stuff. modern tech and a much needed corrective to the hyper male mythology of silicon valley. her compelling, surprising and imminently readable work due credit to the countless

brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. said another, i'm quoting, evans' riveting account of female innovators from the victorian age to today fills in gaps in the history we should have had all along. it provides unique enlightening insight into some of the most revolutionary technological advances of our time. the comment on that book that i like the best is this one. this is a quote. claire evans tells a story like a friend who knows you get bored easily. [ laughter ] it is a generous sort of brilliance that pulls the reader in. so please join me in welcoming to the university of mary washington and to the great lives program, the multi-talented claire evans. [ applause ]

>> hello. hi, everyone. i am so excited to be here. i know it's kind of a spooky time to be gathering in public. so i doubly recognize you for being here and being in a room with other human beings right now. i hope we are all washing our hands. but beyond that, i am grateful to be a part of this auspicious series of lectures about our k collective history. first i have to start up the hoa hard drive. i am going to do something a little bit different than is customary for this series, which is i am not going to be talking about a single individual's contributions to history, but rather talking about a collective of people over -- sorry, yeah, that's me in my best outfit. auto collecti a collective of individuals of generations spanning a couple hundred years. i do this for two reasons.

one, because tech history is complicated and by definition distributed. often tech innovation coalesces among multiple emergent paths, moments of key opportunity and not so much in a clear and linear way. i also try to tell a feminist story. to me the opposite or the corrective to your standard great man history is not necessarily a great woman history. it's something that is a little bit more nuanced, one that reflects the collective nature of our efforts, our shared goals, and the many subtle ways that we influence one another as we go about our lives. but why tell a feminist history of computing at all? well, for me it's personal. so i'm 35. i am an old millennial and i grew up in a home that was full of computers. my dad worked for intel corporation and we always had computers in the home. i never felt growing up that computers were for boys or for girls any more than i thought

the television or toaster was for boys or girls. it was just an appliance in the house. it happened to be an appliance that could transport you to other worlds as you can see clearly in this documentation of me as an 8-year-old playing the cd-rom game mist which, well, maybe that dates my generation. but deeply immersive kind of incredib incredibly boring cd-rom game i was obsessed with. i forced my father to film me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. but i love the computer. not only because it took me to different worlds inside of a story, but also because it took me across the world because thanks to the miracle of the worldwide web, even when i was shut away in my teenage bedroom, i could make connections with individuals all over for the world which for me was a radically liberating thing for an introvert and only child. i thought it was kind of my native country. it was a place where i defined my identity as a young person, that's where i learned how to write, where i learned how to

learn, it's where i learned how to forge connections with others. it was really a place that i thought of as being my home and my country. but something happened in my adulthood between the time that this video was taken and the time that i stand fbefore you now, and that is i changed, you have of course, but the web changed, too. it start today feel more inhospitable than when i was young. it felt more inhospitable as a person but also as a woman. it stopped feeling safe. it stopped being fun and it stopped feeling like home. so a few years ago i began to ask myself, well, had i always been wrong? had this ever been my country? i looked to the past, as you do. i talked to a lot of older women about their careers in the early computing industry and i researched the history of women in computing. in doing so i found a lot of things. i found a lineage.

i found a grip of radical tech grandmothers and mothers that we can all love and emulate, and i found a version of the established history that was very different from what i had been told. a version which wasn't necessarily just about people like steve jobs and bill gates, but rather about a great number of untold heroes and heroines. the thing that was most important, i think, and i don't know how to say this really, but i found the seeds of a different future. we'll get to that. we should probably start at the beginning, like the very beginning. and the history of women in computing is very long and can start in a lot of places. for the sake of brevity, i have chosen 1892 as our starting point. okay. so let's imagine that it's the year 1892. say for the sake of argument you live in new york city. for context, in january of that year an immigration processing center called ellis island opened for business. in march the very first game of basketball was played in springfield, massachusetts,

thanks to the efforts of this man, a ymca instructor desperate to keep a bunch of stir crazy young people interested in hanging out indoors. but the winter is over now, and it's the first of may. so just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. it's long before the screen, before the bite, before the mouse, the pixel. before any of this, there is this notification in the classified pages of "the new york times". computer wanted it says. this is the first instance of the word computer in print. it wasn't placed by a time traveler. it wasn't placed by someone who was transported to the gilded age and jonesing for their laptop. they were looking for a computer to hire, not a computer to buy because, for close to 200 years, a computer was a person. it was a job as in someone who computes, who performance computations for a living. same is true for the word cal cue later.

so you decide that ad and become a human computer. you have to take a math test. if you did well enough, your first day on the job you will be placed at a seat at a long table something like this and you would spend your whole day working on complicated large-scale mathematics problems. you wouldn't work alone. you couldn't because the problems that you would be tackling would be too large for any single individual to handle. you would break them down into bite-sized pieces and work with other people, cross referencing each other's work and crunching numbers in parallel. together with pen and paper, maybe a tabulating machine, you would advance ballistics or maritime navigation or astronomy or pure mathematics. you would form the underlying computational infrastructure of the early scientific age. you would embody it quite literally. you would make science possible. computing offices like these weren't high fa lawsuiting places of higher learning.

charles babbage called what human computerers did mental labor. that's a good way to think about it. you know, computing wasn't something that required a lot of intellectual talent or sophistication. it was work you did with your brain. ultimately, however, human computers did a lot more than hammer nails. they prepared ballistics tra jebt reese for the u.s. army, assisted studies of nuclear fission on the manhattan product, they cracked nazi codes at bletchley park. their applications were as diverse as any mathematical problem. they had one thing in common. it's easy to guess dwha that thing is. they were all women. that's right. computing was so much a women's job, by the time computing machines came along math matitions would measure and calculate how long they took to

process problems in girl years or described units of machine labor in terns of kilo girls, which is pretty remarkable language. and of course from the beginning that women were doing this kind of work were paid less than the very few men doing the same job. in the late 19th century the assist tron mer pickering needed an arsenal of human computers to classify stellar spectrum date in his harvard lab and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilamena fleming, and he didn't do this because of some particular interest in the female mind or some desire to nurture woman in his life. he did it because he had a lot of data to process and he needed to employ twice as many workers to comb through it all. fortunately, women were paid half as much, so he got more for his buck. the harvard computerists who were unfortunately known as pickering's harem catalogued 10,000 stars and wilamena fleming, the maid, discovered

the horse head nebula and her colleague, annie jump cannon, who has like the coolest name in the history of science, could classify spectrum data at three per minute. they mapped the cosmos. but their wages were equivalent to the wages of unskilled worker. they were paid 25 to 50 cents an hour. as the historian david alan grier writes, women like these were not the talented loving daughters of sympathetic men. they were workers. desk laborers who were earning their way into this world through their skill at numbers. that might have been uncommon in the 19th century, but things change, of course, especially during wartime. so major wars have always had an effect on gender and work. the american civil war brought large numbers of battlefield widows into office work. the second world war ushered women in as mechanics, typists, clerks, telephone operators

primarily. telephone companies were the first major employers of a female work force in 1891. so just one year before that a commute wanted ad, 8,000 women worked for the telephone companies. by 1946, nearly a quarter million. they were capable of working collaboratively in fluid networks. we talk about secretarial pools. these are female bodies and minds servaling as a physical infrastructure for an emerging technical age. digital assistants and bots and automated systems and a.i., many of which still speak by default in female voices. as for the human computers, they began to disappear around the 1940s. in some domains and in aeronautics important calculations continued to be done by hand and double-checked well into the 1970s which is when nasa formally dissolved

their human computing divisions made famous by the book "hidden figures." some found work programming the machines during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. and these machines, the earliest electromechanical and electronic computers were developed in secret during the war, to crunch numbers for the war effort, to run ballistics trajectories for the boys at the front. the first people hired to operate these machines were the women who had already been doing that work for centuries beforehand, but specifically the work of calculating ballistics trajectories by hand. and because software wasn't seen as something that was more important than sort of patching cables like a telephone operator or handling punch cards and paperwork like a secretary or doing math like a computer, programming was a job given to women without much thought. of course, these women accepted the work gladly. here was finally something they can do with their mathematics

education that wasn't just becoming a teacher or secretary. except, of course, that operating one of these computers was not at all a simple proposition. these were the first of their kind. there was no precedent. there was no instruction manual. there was no any information really about how to run these things. these were built by engineers and handed off to the operators as an after thought. these computers were the first of their kind. when grace hopper, who had a ph.d. from yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark one program at harvard in 1944, she was given no instruction other than put this math on that and she had to quite literally reverse engineer the machine she had been assigned to, working nights, sleeping under her desk, studying wire diagrams and taking components apart until she felt she understood its workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers that built the machine. now, the same was true for the six women assigned to the first all electronic programmable

computer by the u.s. army at the university of pennsylvania. here we are talking about programming at the machine level. when we talk about programming now you think sitting at a keyboard typing symbols, looking at a screen. this is not what programming was in the 1940s. this was the size of a room. in order to program a machine like this you had to quite literally crawl around inside this room size machine making ephemeral connections with patch cables and punch cards. it was very physical. they were replacing burned out vacuum tubes and fixing connections and wiring control boards. by the time they were finished setting up an operation, which could take weeks for a single program, it could run differential calculus equations. but they were officially classified in their employment as being sub-professional. in fact, when it was first unveiled to the press and public in 1946 after the war, the women that operated it were never introduced. all the mathematical demonstrations it ran, especially for the first public

demonstration to the press, were completely programmed and put on the computer by women, none of them were mentioned in any of the subsequent articles. in fact, the emphasis in a lot of these early press about the eniac was that it was a m miraculous machine, a giant brain made by men that could process mathematical problems in 15 seconds. not acknowledging the weeks of labor that went into actually setting up those problems and devising how they would work on the machine. in some historical images it's credited as models or cropped out of the images entirely. for the sake of writing that historical wrong, i will introduce them to you now. kathleen mccullty, bet 2i jean jennings, elizabeth snider, francis belis, and ruth lichter man. and although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contribution toss the state of the art, i think it would make an excellent name for an all-girl punk band.

i am looking at the front row over here, over here. run with it. i have the t-shirt already made. at the time that it was working during the war and shortly after, so tftware wasn't a word. neither was programmer. what these women was referred to as coding or operating like a telephone operator. and one of the enica 6, betty snider, called their job a cross between ang architect and construction engineer. this comes close to defining what programming is like even today. but it was through the work of women like betty schneider and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the state of the art, defining how it would work during and after the war that programming became something with its own value, a value separate from the menial manipulation of hardware. because of them, it became a

language. it became many languages, in fact. it became an art form. after the war, grace hopper and her peers went on to careers in the early computer industry heading up the programming teams of the very first commercial computer company in the u.s., the eckert mockly computer corporation. it was responsible for the univac, which in the '50s was synonymous with computer. like we say kleenex to mean tissue today, people said univac to say computer in the '50s. because the best people of the world at programming were women, they ran the software side of things entirely. they headed the software side of this operation. they did the univac's logical design. they wrote it's instruction set. they wrote custom programs for every client and every installation and debugged all those programs when necessary, which was a huge workload. in fact, it's because they were so overworked doing this job at the beginning of the commercial computer industry that women

like grace hopper and her contemporaries started to push the art of programming forward by looking for ways to simplify and streamline what was becoming a really tedious and complex process. so during the war they had coded at the machine level using the most elemental instruction sets, but after the war because of their workload they began to develop this idea of automatic programming which is a fancy way of saying that programmers should be able to step above that machine level and with the help of intermediate's like asem blers and compilers and generators be able to code at a higher level of abstraction. the practice of writing programs which could assist in the process of writing other programs to make it easier for human beings and machines to interact. and that moved towards systems level thinking, changed the industry completely, and influenced its entire development and led to nothing less than the development of programming languages. in fact, grace hopper spearheaded the effort to create one of the earliest and most important shared computer

languages, cobol, which is nobody's favorite programming language today. it's possibly responsible for the y2k crisis, but it did the job of opening up computing to another generation. grace hopper and many of her contemporari contemporaries understood computer could not continue to develop if it remained solely in the pursview of experts, in the hands of what was proudly called a shadowy priesthood of coders. grace wanted to see programming made accessible to as many people as possible regardless of technical knowledge. and she knew that could only be possible if users, humans, could communicate with computers using something like natural language, right. not just numbers, but recognizable words. and if that language was hardware independent, meaning it could run on an idea machine as it could on a univac machine. and this notion of interoperability and access regardless of expertise is something that comes up again

and again in the history of women and computers and it's what i would like to emphasize to you today as being one of the primary contributions that women made. i mentioned at the beginning of this talk that the women i came across while writing this book are the seeds of a different future, and it sounds kind of highfalutin, but i mean that. i can't tell you how many times in the process of researching this work i found myself reading about a technology or approach to technology or sort of philosophy that had it been implemented early enough at scale, had it been funding, had it been listened to would fundamentally changed how we operate today. so these women aren't just role models. they are not sticker book characters of cool bad ass ladies from history. they are glimpses at another way of being and another way of building things that is genuinely applicable to the world we live in. a more concrete example. we will jump significantly forward in history from the 1950s to the 1980s to get there. otherwise, we will never go through it all. this is my friend stacey horn.

when this photo was taken in 1989 she had founded an online community. now 1989 is before the worldwide web. in those days online generally meant a bbs, a bulletin board testimon system. a text window you would call on the phone and post text messages and read conversations in a threaded way, similar to a bulletin board in the back of a coffee shop or something. and stacey had been a fan of a very early bulletin board system in the bay area called the well which is often cited as being the first social network. the well was really deeply embedded in the technological culture of the bay area. it was populated mostly by guys mostly cloudily working in the tech industry, mostly emerging from the sort of technoutopian communalist 1970s attitude about technology. it was alienating stacey who was a new yorker, a cynical new yorker, and she couldn't buy all this hippie stuff. she also never wanted to talk about computers.

she couldn't understand how if it you logged into a service using a computer, you had to talk about computers. she wanted to connect with other people and talk about theater and writing and music and art. she didn't want to talk about the specs of her hardware. so when she founded her own system on the east coast she called it echo, east coast hangout. one of the first social networks on the east coast of the u.s. and this gives you a sense of kind of the tone of the culture of what echo was like. it was really gen-x. it was cynical and snarky and intellectual and funny. and she didn't run it out of some garage in palo alto like the guys on the weflt were and she doesn't run it in a office funded by big telecom money. she ran it out of greenwich village. in of itself, fascinating. what makes her interesting to my history here is that echo was founded at a time in 1989 when the percentage of female users

on the internet was low. it was probably 10, 15%, which effective means if you were a woman that was signing on to the early internet in one of its many guises you would get a lot of undo attention if you used a female alias. you maybe would get harassed. a lot of them would use gender-neutral or male aliases to avoid trouble, which made it hard for women to find one another in these early social spaces of the internet au authentically. you didn't know who anybody was that was beautiful but made it difficult to form authentic community with people you were looking to find. echo, during a time when the entire internet was 10% female, she was at 40% female users, which made it one of the earliest spaces online to be genuinely hospitable to women in any way. stacey always resisted the idea she created some kind of safe

space for women. bite me, she wrote in 1998. i told you she was a gen-x'er. bite me. i wanted to get more women on o echo to make it better, not as a concession to women, not a refuge, not an accommodation to a vulnerable population. stacey understood diversity isn't a favor you do to the underrepresented. it's an asset that serves the entire community. her system was predicated on healthy and exciting conversations. she was building a social network. she knew if there were more perspective there would be a more exciting and dynamic conversation and that translate today a better product, and it was. anyway, she had female users because she was the only founder that was actually actively trying to court women to come online. women didn't really come online in large numbers and surpass the male population of internet users until the worldwide web which was significantly later. she would do stuff out of the box. she would recruit people from non-technical places, art

galleries and happenings and shows in new york city and just find interesting looking people and try to convince them to spend $100 on a modem and join her fledgling online community. and if a woman left her service, she would call her personally and ask her what happened. she made access for women free for an entire year. she gave women's groups their own areas of the service. she created private spaces on her network which allowed women to communicate with each other in the absence of men, the way women do sometimes in the absence of men, and report instances of harassment if necessary. she taught uni x-classs so a lack of technology wouldn't be an inhibition. this is her on charlie rose teaching him how to use echo, ever the teacher. but her main strategy for recruiting female users wasn't just this outreach which worked really well in fact, but it was baked into the design of her

system. back in those days online communities were always moderated by hosts. we still kind of have this on the internet today. those moderators in places like reddit. but hosts in the early online communities were users of the service who were kind of deputized and given free access it the service in exchange for their responsibilities of guiding and moderating conversation. kind of like hosts at a party. and although we still have some corners of the internet that have hosts like this, most of this kind of moderation role has been outsourced to contract workers, a shadow world of traumatized employees dealing with the worst of humanity at once and have little to know relationship to the communities they moderate. every conversation on echo had two hosts. a man and a woman. that meant that every time a woman logged on to the service, sometimes logging on to the internet for the very first time she would immediately see herself represented and not just the power structure of this new place, but in a community as well, which made women way less

reluctant to jump in and participate in conversation. other online communities were often dominated by male personalities, people who talked a lot and made it feel a little bit less exciting and interesting to participate in if you were a little bit more of a vanishing personality. there were less lurkers on echo and more active conversationalists. everybody saw them evaselves in mix. it was an egalitarian space. that made it an effective service. now, echo still exists today. it's one of the oldest continuously operating online communities in the world. >> this is actually what it looks like. so stacey never made the jump to the worldwide web. she never sold or franchised or even indulge d in the idea of doing a lucrative ipo bubble. when the worldwide web came along, the first web browser came along, she couldn't afford to create a hyper text interface because she was -- she essentially had a paid service

people dialed into. an idea to a free online model was not something really in her -- she wasn't able to do that. so she never got rich. she never got famous. and regardless of all of that, her accomplishment remains massive to me at least because she managed to tdo two amazing things. achieved gender parity on an almost completely male dominated internet and her platform was remained online for decades outliving many, many web products and nurturing a small devoted family of users because she has cared enough to keep it that way. and that for me is a word from a different future. a different timeline. because we don't hear a lot about care in relation to online space and in tech culture very much. for a lot of people in tech, caring means caring about. it means investing in a big idea, building it with no immediate promise of

remuneration, taking risks, and that is admirable, of course. but what stacey's legacy represents to me is a different kind of care. it's not really caring about. it's caring after. caring for. continuing the commitment of care and investment in a community beyond the exciting moments of the pitch and into the tedious work-a-day realities of what a technology is once it's been built. th in silicon valley, the professional realms associated with this kind of work, realms like content moderation, tend to be filled with people, often women, whose skills are not seen as technical skills. the way i see it, care is very much a technical skill. because software is a mechanism by which human beings facilitate tasks for other human beings. in order to do that effectively, you have to understand the task, understand the mental model of the people approaching that task, understand the context in which they operate, and

understand how to translate all of the messy realities of human flief code. you have to determine whether your tool solves a problem or simply creates new problems and you have to go beyond simple metrics like growth and user acquisition and market share and consider bigger implications like mental health, community, civic life, society at large. i mean, we are living in a world where we are dealing with the consequences of tools that are not designed with those things in mind. tools which are tearing at the social fabric and upending what it means to work, live in the city, changing our way of life. and social skills are essential in all of this. and by social skills i don't mean getting along with people. i mean being able to see a technological object as an extension of and enmeshed with the larger social context in a world of users who are people and ultimately, yes, i mean caring about those people. and i know that something like echo cannot realistically

compete with it's inheritors, but i come back to stacey's story because it represents to me this great lost opportunity. what if the architects of our present-day social media platforms, stacey's inheritors, had made the kinds of efforts at inclusion and representation and mutual respect that someone like stacey made without fanfare because it seemed to her to be the right thing to do? what if those values and that approach were baked into the way we make things rather than patched on later after the fact after people have already been hurt. would i be standing here talking about how, for me, the web isn't funny more or how it doesn't feel like home anymore? i don't think so. and the thing is, stacey is not an outlier. if you are looking for women in the history of technology, it really does help to look first in those places where users are especially cared for. look in those places where form gives way to function, where capital gives way to community, and metrics gave way to meaning.

let me give you another example. this is another scintillatingly 1980s photograph of wendy hall. dame wendy hall. she was given the female equivalent of a knighthood in 2009 for her contributions to computer science. when this photo was taken she was a lowly lecturer in the u.k. her field was pure mathematics. topology, actually. then she discovered hyper text. now, if we think about hyper text at all today we think about it in the context of the worldwide web. the web is written in hyper text markup language, html, and blue hyper text links. in the days before the web, the 1960s, hyper text was the study and practice of connecting ideas, images, multimedia documents together in computer systems through connections or links.

and that was already kind of a utopian idea in a way, but as technology progressed and memory increased and the amount of information that could actually be recalled grew and grew, hypertext grew ever more complex and its implications that we might someday connect all human ideas together in a dense web became a utopian cause in some corners of silicon valley. wendy had been turned on to hypertext it in 1986 through this totally an ac ristic weird british computer system called the documents day project. the documents day project was a country-wide project funded by the bbc and a now defunct british corporation called the acorn computer company to digitally document british life. it was released in 1986 as two laser video discs you could only play on this one specific

commute. t it's all available online in archives. it's fascinating. dig through. it had stuff like virtual walks through the british countryside, images of british cities. maps and first-person accounts about daily life in the u.k. written by british school children all indexed and easily navigable. what made this interesting to wendy, then a mathematician, wasn't all this material. she lived in the u.k. at the time. she knew what it was like. but how it was and a half gatd. this a glimpse of what the interface looked like. it looks like a website or a cd-rom game or early sort of internet experience. this is at a time when most people's experience of their computers were numbers on screens. this is way before visual user swer face, very ahead of its time. it wasn't the material, but just how it was navigated. way before the web taught us to point and click at images in sort of especially recognizing

areas. east r it was novel to walk around a screen using visual cues and it suddenly made all of the impersonal seeming data that computers made accessible feel all of a sudden very intuitive and very immediate and immediate and very exciting it made it comprehensible to people outside of computer science. and combined with the emerging technology of the personal computer, wendy realized it might make all this previous unaccessible information accessible to large numbers of people. again, this idea of accessibility regardless of expertise. to wendy that felt revolutionary and very exciting. she decided to throw herself into this field of hyper text. her colleagues at southampton in the mathematics department and later in the computer science department told her there was no future for her at the university or computer science if she kept up with this hyper text hyper media stuff. she ignored them as all the grates do and dedicated her effort to making a computer

system that would make it possible for people to browse library materials through lots of multi-media documents. she began with the archives at her university's library. by 1989 her team built an entire system called microcosm. just as the worldwide web would do, a few years later microcosm demonstrated this new exciting intuitive way of navigating information. it made the information dynamic, alive and adaptable to its users. in fact, it wasn't like the web at all. in many ways it was better. i'm going to give you a quick primer on the fundamentals here. this is what a web page looks like, at least circa 1992, links, hyper links are contextual which means they're i'm breaded in the documents which means when the destination of the link is taken down, we get what is called a 404 error.

this is a common feature. there's a lot of dead ends anywhere. beyond being an inconvenience to the everyday browser of the web, it's a luge loss to our culture. when we get a 404 are record, the piece of information that connected two ideas together is gone forever. that's meta data. that's meaning. that's context. the essence of what makes knowledge interesting -- knowledge. mike cross cos did something different. it didn't do this. it kept all these links separate in a link base. i won't get keep into the weeds on this. all the links in microcosm were able to communicate with underlying documents without making a mark on them. they curve as an overlay rather than a structural change to the material. what this meant is that a link could have many different sources in many different destinations, a much more fluid understanding of what a link could be. it meant it could go in two

directions, different users could layer different links on top of the same material depending on their level of fluency with their material or their interest. the system was designed to be adaptable to people and to encourage natural human learning, connection building. it was built for that and valued that most important piece, the nature of the connections between things. gn, web bad, microcosm good. there were a lot of hyper texty systems like this in the late '80s, early '690s, coming out o apple, ibm, xerox. i know they don't look that glamorous now. but i promise they were exciting in different ways. nearly every team building these systems at the time had women in senior positions if not at the helm. that's because hyper text as a discipline was welcoming to people outside traditional computer science backgrounds.

if you went to an early hyper text conference, you'd be surrounded by humanists, poets, historians, what wendy calls the lit rory. it was people interested in making meaning out of data. all these systems, as different as they were from one another, they shared the value, the idea that the association between ideas is what was the most important thing about making links, why links were connected. to that community of scholars, that was the very essence of the field because from why emerges the deepest kind of meaning. in fact, it was so much what the discipline was about that when sir tim burnersly, the male equivalent of a damehood for his contributions to computer science, when sir timberers in lee presented at the hyper text

'91 conference in san antonio, the first time the web was shown in the u.s., his paper wasn't even accepted. he had to bring his own demo on his own $10,000 computer from switzerland to san antonio on his own dime to demonstrate it on the conference floor at a hotel in san antonio. even then, most people were highly disinterested in what he was showing them because they took one look at his demo and saw the links were all contextual and embedded in the documents which meant they could easily break. his links only went in one direction. what good was it if the links were so limited and could so easily break. beyond that, it was built on the backbone of the internet which at the time was cost prohibitive for most people. you can see how unimpressed everyone in the photo looks. you look at these women, they're not having it. one detail about this story that is so wonderful is that because this conference was held in the

summer in san antonio, texas, one of the prime diversions after the conference, the main entertainment was a massive margarita fountain in the courtyard outside. it is a true fact the first time the worldwide web was shown to scholars in the u.s., everybody was outside getting drunk on margaritas and nobody cared. this is one of the only photographs of this moment, there is a margarita on the table. this woman wandered in from the courtyard with margarita in hand. what is this web thing? i don't think so. i love it. it's such a snapshot. we know what happened with the web. very quickly it outpaced everything in the hyper text world. by 1992 timberers in lee published the first madge, the photo of a due opinion band who sang satirical songs about life in the lab. this isn't hugely related, but i have to share this music video

which gives you a taste of how amazing they were. ♪ >> there's a lot of these videos on youtube and i highly recommend you dig through it. it's delightful. anyway, that being said, obviously after this came everything else. the web became standard. by 1994 tim berners-lee was

giving the keynote. it was so clear that nobody would want to overlap both. the more sophisticated systems, like wendy hall's incredible microcosm system quickly became a thing of the past. there's no way for us to know if something like microcosm could have replaced our web just as there's no way for us to know that what would have happened if something like echo had had enough funding to make the transition to the warld wide web and had become our foundational social network. it doesn't stop me from dreaming about it. that's what i mean about the different futures that some of these stories present us with. they demonstrate very vividly how many other paths have laid before us throughout this history, just as many paths still lie before us if we only could look for them. it's important to remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. new technologies don't fall from

the sky unbitten. they've merge from a continuum of ideas. the worldwide web could not have existed without the decades of research done by hyper text scholars, mostly women, in the ideas and conventions of linking, and social media as we experience today could not exist without decades of experimentation in online community building on platforms long gone, some of which are still with us. tech history, like much history, is often told to us as a story of solitary genius working alone. we know all about timberers in lee, bill gates and steve jobs. of course those people are remarkable people. they've never been alone. they've always been vournded by people and ideas. making big things requires big communities. that's what's so exciting about technology, it invites so many of us in. it also makes it so hard to see where things come from. more importantly where things

might lead and where they could still lead. only don't see the multiplicity of all this, we leave out a huge part of the story, a beautiful part of the story and make it so much harder for all these other versions of the established history to work their influence on our world and help us to make it better. machines, of course, can now perform in fractions of a second what would have taken a human computing office many girl years to complete. but for a few centuries, women working together were hardware, they were the hardware distributed by logical machines capable of calculations beyond the powers of any single individual. these calculations cataloged the cosmos, charted the stars, measured the world. the computer as we know it today is named after the people it replaced, an long before we came to rely on the network as a fundamental part of our lives, our grand mothers and great grand mothers were performing the functions that brought its existence about.

in the 1960s women were half of the workforce in computer, 40% of degrees in computer science programs at american universities until 1984 when that number began to dive and kept diving. since then the industry has found many different cunning ways to edge women out of the picture, none of which would be surprising to you, wage disparity, lack of mentorship, structural unwillingness to make space for child care and shift in credentials and requirements necessary to get a job as a programmer. technology historians suggest the professionalization of the field of computing led to its implicit masculinization. if it began as women's work, i had to be made masculine, most notably an effort industrywide in the late 1960s to more conducive to men.

this has made it more difficult for women to keep their toe hold in the industry and set a male dominant precedent reinforced by decades of marketing and misconception. if you were someone interested in buying or reading about computers in the 1970s, you would probably see ads like this all the time. if you search any library archive for historical images of computers, they're wildly sexist. you might see also products like these, the honeywell kitchen computer which took two weeks of programming classes to learn to operate, marketed to women as something to help organize their recipes in the household. it came with ad copy like this, if she can only cook as well as honeywell can compute. extravagantly condescending language. a whole entire generation of people grew up with this as a kind of default. i'm a little younger. i grew up with things like this.

this is the movie "weird science" which is about a couple of geek boys who design their dream woman using the computer. when i was a kid, that was a lot of the imagery around computer, it was for boys, something that boys liked to do, something boys were naturally good at, something boys enjoyed and girls did not. it was something that made people believe that men are somehow natural to the realm of computing and women are at best accessories to it. that's like propaganda. it's not true, a lie, an anachronism. a lot of us are proof. if you remember nothing else from this talk, and i don't blame if you forgotten everything about bbs communities an deeper hyper text history or automatic programming, please remember this, if there is a boys club in silicon valley, it's an anachronism. technological histories are important. if women and girls are able to see themselves in the dna of our

planet's most profoundly formative technologies as they well should, they can see themselves more easily in its future. i write about history and i don't know much about the future, but one thing i know for sure. if we're going survive it, dare i say restart it, then we need all the help that we can get. thank you. >> thank you, claire. now we'll take some questions. if you raise your hand, we'll find as many of you as we can. >> thank you. i assume the purpose of your

talk is to say a woman's brain is as good as a man's brain. i assume that's the purpose -- >> i would hope -- step one, yeah. >> intellectually. but then halfway through it looked to me like -- maybe you'll disagree -- the lady stacy who was selling her product echo was using sex to sell it. was that true or not? >> i missed the second part of that. >> that picture of her, stacy, was that a sexual picture -- >> her doing this? >> no, no, no. >> oh, sitting on the table. >> i don't think it's a particularly sexy picture. it's an edgy picture. she was popular in '90s counterculture writing about technology. i wouldn't say it's particularly sexy. that being said, a woman can be intelligent and sexy at the same time and use whatever powers she would like to sell her product.

>> okay, courtney. go ahead. >> not so much a question, but some trivia about grace hopper. >> yes, please. >> in the '80s she was promoted to the one star rank of commodore, and that's the time when pcs were deployed everywhere, the ibm pc, radio shaq trs 80 and the commodore computer. in some corners she was referred to as the computer commodore. you mentioned earlier her work about -- with compilers and assemblers and trying to take simple plain english language and use a machine to translate things into language that computers could work with, and she was so focused on making that connection and communicating to people that, among other things, whenever she

had a public display, she would distribute what she called an a nanoseco nanosecond, the distance it takes the speed of light to travel in a nanosecond, about 12 inches. so she distributed these as a way to communicate to people that when you see tv reporters talking to each other and there's a delay in the conversation, it's because of satellite transmissions taking time, that clearly she was a real rule breaker, and she trained and told the people who worked on her team to break the rules, but they were in the navy, and still observe the chain of command. the final rule that she broke was after she retired, she insisted, whenever she went out in public to wear her uniform.

she was so proud of serving the country, but that was against the rules. >> she was one of the greats. one of the interesting things about her early career in the navy is that when she was first assigned the harvard mark one computer, she was entering a male dominated environment. she was in the navy, and they referred to the computer as a she, like a boat. it was very clipped and very rule bound and everybody wore uniforms. ultimately the uniforms and the structure and the hire ar ki was effective in dissolving any gender boundaries that existed. everybody was the same and working towards a common cause which ultimately i think benefited her. that's probably part of why she was so attached to the uniform later in light as well. she was one of the greats, obviously. >> claire, a question over here. >> thank you for your talk.

it was really wonderful. having a bunch of granddaughters and hoping to lead them into the future, could you name some of the women that you think are inspiration today and leaders in the tech world that you think we should follow? i'd appreciate that, thank you. >> of course. i write about history, so most of my heroes are old school. i have a good friend tracy chow who is an amazing software engineer working on a product called block party which is an app that allows women to block people harassing them across different social media platforms. i love the idea of taking those problems that are handed down to us mono cultural tech companies that aren't thinking about the implications of tools that they make and finding ways to create your own solutions to them. it's a beautiful way of handling the complexities of what are ahead of us. i should hope your granddaughters would be people i

could cite in future lectures. >> hi, claire. thank you so much for coming. i've been such a big fan of you and your work for so long. >> oh, amazing. >> i'm wondering if you could expand on a point you made earlier about how most of the ai that we have is voiced by females, and also you put out a track a while back called "party at the nsa." i wonder what you think of how we have this widespread surveillance in our homes with things like google home and voice assistance and such. >> two big questions. yeah, i was surprised when i was doing the historical research to discover there is a clear lineage between female telephone operators and the way we're accustomed to hearing female voices on the other side of the phone in these roles, operators,

gpss, ai systems. but also pa announcements in train stations and airports. there's lots of different reasons and justifications for that. some people say both men and women respond more positively to a female voice in that context. i don't know if that's true. i've heard female voices cut through ambient sound more clearly. some think that's true. i think it's a cultural association that we now have. i think it's really important for us to begin to deconstruct that quickly, especially with conversational ai like siri and alexa and cortana and all these tools. they are sort of teaching us to automatically assume that female voices are going to be subservient to our command. it scares me, especially with kids. i worry we're teaching a generation of kids to bark commands at these ambient help mates floating around the house. that's one problem. i recently interviewed a woman at google working on the team working on the google assistant.

she told me how she worries about this, and she says they built in something called pretty please where kids have to say please. i don't think that gets to the root of the problem. but i think having these conversations about how do we design a neutral ai, what does that mean? how does that come through in a human voice? these are important questions we should be definitely thinking about. and there are big design problems that i think next generation of designers should tackle. what is more exciting than designing the voice of an artificial intelligent agent? what an opportunity to interface in an intimate way with technology and create social precedence and standards for the way we communicate with each other and our tools. i think all of that is a great opportunity. at the same time, the flip side is the surveillance aspect of these tools which is genuinely very scary, and i don't have an alexa in my house. it gives me the heebie jeebies.

i have a siri in my phone, but i think we need to be conscience as consumers in what we're letting into our homes and becoming okay with because i think it's a slippery slope for sure. >> hi. >> cool shirt. >> my question is somewhat similar. do you think buy as towards ai is contributed through that sexism? things like alexa and siri are brought up, but i even see in film a lot of ai women are portrayed in a sexist way. they could be interfaces or basic humanoid figures. >> for sure. it's interesting to me that the most prevalent ai architects we have in film are sexy lady voice or scary murder rouse sociopathic man voice. that may be more about how we think of gender in our society.

in a lot of cases we can't tackle these tech problems until we look in the mirror first. i don't think there are technical solutions to social problems. i think we need to be working on ourselves. that being said, i think science fiction film and cinema is a really important site for educating the public on what technology is. we have widespread it literacy on what ai is and how it works, based that it's either a compliant or sociopathic voice. even thinking about ai in an an poe morphic way is detrimental to our understanding of how the technology actually functions which is a series of highly specified mathematical operations for classifying data. it's way less sexy, but we need to find a way to tell stories that represents ai for what it is and represents the things genuinely scary ai.

or that we're going to reiterate the inherent biases in our data and inflict them on a new generation of people, all that stuff is way scarier to me than something like skynet. so i think we have a lot of work to do. i think there needs to be more of us conversation between computer scientists, scientists and filmmakers, artists and writers to tell better stories about the future. >> a question from one of my students. >> this is a jump to the past i guess. do you have any information about aida lovelace? >> of course. you can't write a book about women in computer without her. she's one of the characters that's often trotted out in this context. i'm not sick of her. i love her, a fascinating character.

yes, the first two chapters of my book are about her. she was the daughter of the poet lord byron. she was an incredibly brilliant mathematician in her own right and had the same reckless poetic sensibility as her father, but about numbers instead of words. she's responsible for writing the first computer programs 150 years and change before a machine that was never built. she was one of the first people, the first person to understand that computers could process information beyond just numbers. she made these sort of conceptual leaps in her writing about computer to imagine a world in which computers might operate upon music or colors or these more abstract entities. how write she was. it took a long time for us to catch up to it. we're just beginning to understand. >> do you have a question over there? andy? okay, andy. >> obviously you grew up with technology from the time you

could walk. and my question is, i think we're all marveling, we got our smart phones now, you click that you agree to the terms and so forth. it's kind of like your smart phone knows what you're doing. how do you think that's going to affect society, the fact that our privacy is anticipated? >> well, there's a couple of ways of thinking about that. one, our smart phone doesn't know what we're doing, but the people who are building the software that our smart phone runs certainly know what we're doing because they're tracking all of our consumer habits and tracking what we browse and what we look at, how long we look at it. if we open our emails or not, what links we go to from what email. everything is quantified down to the individual second of our time. i'm more of raid of the people who build those tools knowing a lot about me rather than the tool itself. yes, it's scary to me we have traded privacy for convenience pretty much wholeheartedly as a

culture. it's really difficult. we tend to go for the path of least resistance. we're trying to participate in culture, trying to connect with other people, trying to have the conveniences of the world, trying to get places and use maps. we're doing all the things we do, not because we are oblivious to what has happened, but because we want to be part of the larger world. unfortunately the barrier to entry is giving up a large measure of our privacy. i don't know that that's a good deal that we've made, but it seems to be a deal that we've collectively made. i think the tech companies are profiting enormously from that. >> you said something that really sounded scary to me which was making sure that we say please to alexa, like we're going to hurt her feelings, that machine. i notice that is a common thread where you have to constantly treat a machine better and machine needs food like you do

and are you hurting the machine's feelings. should there be some kind of cap or protocol or something that makes sure that we don't have to treat machines like they have feelings? that always seems to be where they get out of control. >> i think when we say please to alexa, it's not so much for alexa's benefit, but for ours, right? we don't want to get into the habit of being demanded, especially to engrain in our kids healthy habits of boundaries and being respectful to others. if their interactions with alexa are forming their young brains into thinking that's how you behave with other people, we better make sure that respect is built into that. personally, i know it's corny, but i genuinely feel like when i'm being nice to my siri or delicate with my computer, it's more about just being a gentle person in general, right? it's about modeling -- consistently modeling this empathetic behavior towards all

things. i don't think that my computer is alive, but i know that the world is alive and i want to be a respectful participant in this planet. i want to do that wherever i can. i know it's dumb and i know that siri doesn't have feelings, but i think it makes me feel better and makes me feel like a better person when i try to be respectful of siri regardless. >> well said. one more. >> looking to the future. do you have any information on the gender of the people who are studying in the colleges and universities in computer science, computer engineering field. secondly, beyond that, do you detect any bias in the hiring of those students? >> that's not particularly my field. i know there's still a significant wage gap in tech, still a diversity and inclusion problem in tech and it's in the entire pipeline. the problems are systemic. they go way back. there are also problems of diversity and inclusion in

computer science programs, in computer science education leading up to that which is why there's such a strong emphasis now on s.t.e.m. education at a really young age so we can engrain in kids that tech is for everybody, not just for boys, it's for anyone interested in it. i also think part of dismantling this is beginning to question what is technical, what qualifies as a technical job. i think we associate classical programming with a techy job and all these peripheral jobs or round it like user interface design which are seen as being not aztec cal and not given the same kind of economic remuneration in tech workplaces. those jobs to me are very technical and they are part and parcel of making good software products. i think it's kind of brick wall we have between front end and back end is really dangerous and makes for bad products. i think there's more fluidity in the definitions there that you will see much more movement in terms of gender back and forth

on those things. i think sometimes men feel like it's somehow stigmatizing for them to work in these slightly user facing roles in tech, so they stick to what they think is what is for men versus the other way around. when we break down those divisions, we all benefit from that's nor mousily. we have a lot of work to do. it took some generations to get to where we are now, and it will probably take another generation to get back to where we were in the '50s in a way. >> claire, don't go away. don't go away. let me show you what's coming up thursday we hope. doug, let's see -- yes. great topics, c.s. lewis. by devin brown and you may recall he did tul kin last year for us and was a very effective speaker. i hope you'll be back for that, hope you'll all be back for it. check the website to be sure.

we look forward to that. right now it's on and we look forward to seeing you. ment now, you are going to go back and sign some books in the back. so before you do that, let's show our appreciation for a wonderful presentation. [ applause ] >> thank you, bill. weeknights this month we're featuring "american history tv" programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight "society of the cincinnati" founded in 1783 by continental army officers and their french counterparts. you'll hear from t. cole jones on his books "captives of liberty, prisoners of war and politics of vengeance in the american revolution." about 18th century prison camps and how the continental congress handled pows. "american history tv" this week and every weekend on c-span3.

every saturday nightmare khan history tv takes you to college classrooms around the country for lectures in history. >> why do you all know who lizzy borden is? raise your hand if you ever heard of this jean harris murder trial before this class? >> the deepest cause where we'll find the new meaning of the revolution is from the transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. >> we'll talk about both of these sides of the story here, the tools, the techniques of slave owner power. we'll also talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. watch history professors lead discussions with their students on topics ranging from the american revolution to september 11th. lectures in history on c-span3, every saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on "american history tv." lectures in history is available as a podcast. find it where you listen to podcasts.

now science writer and author natalia holt on her book "rise of the rocket girls," the women who propelled us from missiles to the moon and mars. she talks about women recruited in the 1950s to do crucial work in the space program. this 50-minute talk is part of the william b. crawley great lives lecture series hosted by the university of mary washington. now to introduce tonight's speaker, nah thalia holt. having stud did at hum boat state university and received a phd from university of southern california and further study at tulane university, ms. halt has conducted research at the jelt propulsion archives, the cal tech library and schlessinger library on the history of women in america at harvard. in addition, she's been a fellow at the raven institute at massachusetts generh